The Great Migration of 1843 Opens the Oregon Trail to Families

In the spring of 1843, a wagon train of nearly 1,000 people gathered near Independence, Missouri, determined to reach the distant Oregon Country. Critics scoffed that families could never haul wagons two thousand miles across plains, deserts, and the Rocky Mountains. They were wrong: the so-called Great Migration made it safely through.

The key to success was South Pass, a broad, gentle saddle through the Rockies in present-day Wyoming that let heavy wagons cross the continental divide. Roughly 875 settlers completed the journey that season, most of them farm families from the Mississippi valley traveling with livestock trailing behind.

It was the first large household migration to Oregon, and its survival turned a fur-trappers’ route into a highway for ordinary families.

Reaching the Willamette Valley before winter, the emigrants demonstrated that the overland crossing was feasible. Their example triggered wave after wave of migration through the 1840s and 1850s, reshaping the map of the American West and helping cement U.S. claims to the Pacific Northwest.